- Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Monroe all died on July 4.
- Australia is wider than the moon.
- NoNRePReSeNTaTiONaLiSm can be assembled from chemical symbols.
- 1 × 56 – 1 – 7 = 15617
- “‘Needless to say’ is, needless to say, needless to say.” — Enoch Haga
His Image
In 2018 a team of researchers at the University of North Carolina presented 511 American Christians with randomly paired pictures of faces and asked them to identify which of the pair more closely resembled the face of God. By combining the selected faces, the psychologists could produce a composite image of the Creator as envisioned by various groups. (Here, the image on the left is God as young participants imagine him; the one on the right is how he’s seen by older participants.)
Liberals tend to imagine that God is younger, more feminine, and more loving than conservatives, and African-Americans picture a God who looks more African-American than Caucasians do, but the traditional image of the powerful older man with the flowing beard is nowhere to be seen.
“People’s tendency to believe in a God that looks like them is consistent with an egocentric bias,” said senior author Kurt Gray. “People often project their beliefs and traits onto others, and our study shows that God’s appearance is no different — people believe in a God who not only thinks like them, but also looks like them.”
One exception, though: Men and women believed in an equally masculine-looking God.
(Joshua Conrad Jackson, Neil Hester, and Kurt Gray, “The Faces of God in America: Revealing Religious Diversity Across People and Politics,” PLOS One, June 11, 2018.)
The Mystery Tombstone
In Plymouth, Tobago, lies a tomb with an enigmatic inscription:
Within these walls are deposited the bodies of Mrs. Betty Stiven and her child. She was the beloved wife of Alex B Stiven to the end of his days will deplore her death which happened upon the 25th day of Nov. 1783 in the 23rd year of her age. What was remarkable of her, she was a mother without knowing it, and a wife without letting her husband know it except by her kind indulgences to him.
Theories abound, but there’s no consensus as to its meaning.
Reciprocity
In 2006, Math Horizons challenged its readers to pose a problem in such a way that it contained its own answer. Rheta Rubenstein of the University of Michigan-Dearborn offered a pair of questions that answer one another:
- What fraction of the letters in three-eighths are vowels?
- What fraction of the letters in one-third are vowels?
(“Self-Answering Problems,” Math Horizons 13:4 [April 2006], 19.)
“Valentine by a Telegraph Clerk”
Another poem by James Clerk Maxwell:
The tendrils of my soul are twined
With thine, though many a mile apart.
And thine in close coiled circuits wind
Around the needle of my heart.
Constant as Daniel, strong as Grove.
Ebullient throughout its depths like Smee,
My heart puts forth its tide of love,
And all its circuits close in thee.
O tell me, when along the line
From my full heart the message flows,
What currents are induced in thine?
One click from thee will end my woes.
Through many a volt the weber flew,
And clicked this answer back to me;
I am thy farad staunch and true,
Charged to a volt with love for thee.
Ambition
In a quarry at Aswan lies an unfinished obelisk, the largest the ancient Egyptians ever attempted. It’s 137 feet long and weighs more than 1,000 tons, more than two jumbo jets or 200 African elephants. If it had been completed it would have weighed more than twice as much as any other obelisk that the Egyptians ever erected. Cracks appeared in the granite before workers could carve it from the bedrock, so the project was abandoned.
“The obelisk is so large that it makes a cameo appearance in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1923 silent film The Ten Commandments,” writes Egyptologist Bob Brier in Cleopatra’s Needles (2021). “In one scene we see Israelites toiling under the whip of a cruel taskmaster, pulling a large block of stone up an inclined ramp. That incline is the unfinished obelisk!”
Black and White
Sound Sense
What is sound? We’re told that it’s a wave traveling through a medium, but we don’t hear sounds as existing in the air; we hear them as located at the place where they’re generated. Is sound a quality of an object or of the surrounding medium?
“Listening to the birds outside your window, the students outside your door, the cars going down your street, in the vast majority of cases you will perceive those sounds as being located at the place where they originate,” writes St. Joseph’s University philosopher Robert Pasnau. “But if sounds are in the air, as the standard view holds, then the cries of birds and of students are all around you. This is not how it seems.”
Properly speaking, then, where should we say a sound is located? At its point of origin, or filling the air?
(Robert Pasnau, “What Is Sound?” Philosophical Quarterly 49:196 [July 1999], 309-324.)
Lip Service
British tongue twisters:
United States twin-screw steel cruisers.
I shot three shy thrushes. You shoot three shy thrushes.
The rain ceaseth and sufficeth us.
A wicked cricket critic.
Many an anemone sees an enemy anemone.
All I want is a proper cup of coffee,
Made in a proper copper coffee pot.
You can believe it or not —
I want a cup of coffee
In a proper coffee pot.
Tin coffee pots or
Iron coffee pots,
They’re no use to me,
If I can’t have a
Proper cup of coffee
In a proper copper coffee pot
I’ll have a cup of tea.
Ken Parkin’s 1969 Anthology of British Tongue-Twisters is arranged anatomically, so to speak, according to the part of the mouth that gets the workout. These are listed under “Two Lips”:
Bill Badger brought the bear a bit of boiled bacon in a brown bag.
Gig-whip. Gig-whip. Gig-whip.
The broom blooms when the bluebells bloom.
And “Weak writers want white ruled writing paper.”
Progress
Deposition of Elizabeth Brett, a Hertfordshire farmer’s servant, regarding an alarming experience on Sept. 15, 1784:
This deponent, on her oath, saith, that on Wednesday the 15th day of September instant, between four and five o’clock in the afternoon, she, this deponent, being then at work in her master’s brewhouse, heard an uncommon and loud noise, which, on attending to it, she conceived to be the sound of men singing as they returned from harvest-home. That upon going to the door of the house she perceived a strange large body in the air, and, on approaching it in a meadow-field near the house, called Long Mead, she perceived a man in it; that the person in the machine, which she knew not what to make of, but which the person in it called an air-balloon, called to her to take hold of the rope, which she did accordingly; that John Mills and George Philips, labourers with said Mr. Thomas Read, came up soon after, and, being likewise requested to assist in holding the rope, both made their excuses, one of them, George Philips, saying he was too short, and John Mills saying that he did not like it; that this deponent continued to hold the rope till some other harvest-men of Mr. Benjamin Robinson, of High Cross, came up, by whose assistance the machine was held down till the person got out of the machine. And this deponent further, on her oath, saith, that the person now present and shown to her by William Baker, Esq., the justice of peace before whom this deposition is taken, as Mr. Vincent Lunardi, and in her presence declares himself to be Mr. Vincent Lunardi, was the person who called to me from the machine, as above stated, and who descended therefrom in the said field called Long Meadow.
Other witnesses acknowledged that Lunardi had told them “that he had set out from the Artillery Ground in London, a little before two o’clock in the afternoon of the said day, in the machine, and had travelled through the air to the place where they found him.” He later described his view of the city from this new perspective.
From Christopher H. Turnor’s Astra Castra, 1865, via Humphrey Jennings, Pandaemonium, 1985.